Decolonizing Suburbia team presents on their project for the Center for Architecture’s exhibition, Reset: Towards a New Commons.

Decolonizing Suburbia is informed by an interest in the suburban patterns of development that characterize most cities in the United States. Despite broad professional consensus that the future of housing is in high-density buildings, much of the country’s general population continues to live in neighborhoods that we consider suburban, even if they are located within the legal boundaries of a larger city. There is, in the profession, a reluctance to acknowledge the simple fact that in the U.S., the city and the suburbs are often indistinguishable. Decolonizing Suburbia explores the potential of the detached house, a popular architectural type deeply ingrained into U.S. popular consciousness, to accommodate more diverse forms of life that go beyond the prevailing “single-family” paradigm. The project engages with the architectural ramifications of decolonizing the planning policies that enabled white flight to the suburbs and deliberately isolated people of color in under-resourced, jobless inner cities.